Being the Kraken
by KrisEleven
Summary: For centuries he has waited in the deepest ocean depths- ship killer, man-eater, old as time. When a fish of the likes he has never seen before starts talking about fleets with a need to be destroyed, well... He has been bored for a very long time.


A/N Edited 10/20/09. This takes place during Wild Magic, when Daine is trying to get help during the siege on Pirate's Swoop. Thanks to LunaSphere and Sweet Sassy Sarah for being the absolute best betas I could ask for. Part of the summary of this story was taken directly from Wild Magic. Awarded second place in the Summer 2009 Knighthood of Ficship Awards!

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_Below the thunders of the upper deep;_

_Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,_

_His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep_

_The Kraken sleepeth. _

The Kraken, Lord Alfred Tennyson

Boredom.

He watched a fish float by— completely blind and unaware that the kraken lay just meters away. The fish was lit by bright white-blue lights along its back and beside its wide mouth. A small white fish, its skeleton visible through its skin, swam close to the tempting lights and was snatched into those jaws.

The kraken ate the glowing fish because it amused him. He stretched out his tentacles, scaring away the life within his wide range. On ancient instinct, the ocean's creatures knew not to stay where he could catch them when he rose from his sleep and it occurred to him that he needed something to occupy his mind. He drew himself back into the hollow he had spent decades carving into the seabed.

Bored.

And then he heard something, carried to him through the currents of the ocean he was so connected to. He had never seen a little fish like this one before. He listened as it called to the whales, asking for their help in violence. Silly little fish— down here anyone (with the ability to know anything) knew that the whales would not help others in that respect. Couldn't even help themselves, which was why the humans on their little boats could pull them up into the air, up out of the water, and carve them into pieces. He should know – he had toppled enough of those little boats with their humans aboard.

This little fish did not know about the whales, and it asked anyway. The kraken shifted in his hollow, waiting. There was talk of ships and battle, killing grounds and the need for destruction.

He had been bored for so long.

The kraken shook its tentacles, intrigued as the whales fled. Stuffy cowards.

_Hello, little fish?_ he sent into the waters.

He could still hear the fish's distress, but there was no response. It stayed near the shore for a time, before it began to follow the whales towards their southern feeding grounds. Well, that wouldn't do. Not at all. He tapped into the magic he commanded, the currents and tides of the ocean springing to life within his mind and he gave a small pull and the little fish responded, although it swam in no way he had seen before. It followed his currents across the ocean floor as he pulled it deeper into his world, towards the home he had made in the depths.

Finally, it found him. He felt its shock through the water, the feeling of fear carried to the sensors on his tentacles.

_I will kill any fleet you like, little fish. You were talking to the whales. Pacifists, all of them—Enough to make me vomit. Just show me where those nasty raiders are. I can guarantee they won't trouble you for long._

_You'd never make it on time_, the fish answered, and he felt her true form. A human! What was a human doing down here, all able to talk? It had been too long since he's had a mystery to ponder and this was a welcome change from the darkness of the ocean… With more excitement to come if this little shadow would just tell him where the fight was.

_Leave that to me_, he said, and he realized it was not a human. Not quite. He felt her in the waters and he felt behind the shadow-form, the powers. He had seen this before, in the form of this sea's wave-walker, in the Trickster who shared with the kraken his games, in times long ago. So the little fish was linked to the gods, then.

The little fish, this gods-shadow hesitated.

_Come, my dear—this is no time to be squeamish,_ he prompted.

There was a moment, a small one, where he feared the shadow might disappear, along with his only chance at a distraction. Then the shadow relented and the kraken saw as she saw. Maps, made by human hands, with tiny dots that represented the fleet and its location, a view of the cove from high atop stone walls he could destroy with a tentacle's grasp, if he chose, and the fleet from her view within the waves. Ship after ship, but not nearly enough to worry him.

The little fish zipped away from him, and he let it go. It was shadow, mere magic, and he could not keep up with its speed, but he was not much slower. He laughed in delight as he pushed himself up from the ocean's bottom for the first time in centuries. _This_ would be fun! Half swimming, half crawling along the ocean's floor, he hurried through the dark towards the raiders of Pirate's Swoop.

There was a steep rise in the ocean floor, almost a vertical cliff where his domain of the deep waters ended and the warmer blue of the surface began. This was the living-creatures realm, the realm of the mortals.

But he was unstoppable. They could do nothing to keep him in his hollow if he instead chose to seek the distraction of the sun.

He pulled all of his tentacles underneath his body and pushed up off the ocean floor, rising swiftly above the debris he scattered, following the clear waters as the silt chased him to the surface. His tentacles floated around him and then pushed back together, propelling him along the ocean's surface towards the cove where the shadow had promised him a fight.

He could feel it already. There were disturbances in the waves, movement propelled by that dreadful human magic—the kind that tingled and burned and irritated like an electric fish. There was fire as one of the flying immortals crashed into his waves, sinking towards the ocean's bottom. He could not feel the shadow anymore, but he was nearly there, by then. He could taste the steam, the wood, the ships' glue. He pushed one more time, gliding beneath the ships and slowed himself, hovering.

He could touch the ocean's bottom here, and he did so with a few tentacles, holding himself in place beneath the raider ships. Long ago, when he was still energetic enough to roam the oceans, the sailors used to know him. They used to keep a watch out for him resting in the sun, knowing that unfamiliar islands may well be his body. They used to have caution for any strange currents, they used to know that fish followed after him when he'd had a meal.

They used to pray to the Trickster and the ocean's gods to protect them from him, going so far as to drag trinkets of their gods under their ships in order to inform him that they were under a god's protection. Sometimes he had taken the trinkets, sometimes he had taken the ships (because he answered to no mortal's god).

But they had forgotten about him long ago, when he had grown too tired and bored to swim the seas. Short-living creatures, they had no memory for the ageless who shared their world and the things they had forgotten had allowed them to grow fearless, these arrogant floaters. The shadow had woken him… And he had been bored for so long.

He let his magic, ancient and indefinable, float up into the ships above him, the image flashing into his mind as he felt the wood and metal and men and magic. He found the ship that had fired upon the dragon, its weapon still hot with the fire and the magic and the death. He shot one of his tentacles up, out of the water, gripping the weapon and dragging it from its place on the vessel, into the water. He let it sink into the depths—it was nothing to eat. Above him, the force of his tugging had pulled the ship over on its side. He picked off the sailors – shadows in the waves against the sun – with a few tentacles, bringing them closer to his body, tasting human for the first time in a long time. Feeling the rest of the ships, he chose his next target.

His magic could only reach so far out of the waves, and the tallest ship was almost out of his sight, away from the water so that his vision of the top was faded and blurry. He corrected this by finding the irritating mast that went up into the air, along with the nest that held the sailor hiding so far off of the ocean's surface. He held it with one tentacle and snapped it, dropping the useless stick to the ocean. That was better. Much easier to see everything, now.

He pushed a tentacle across the next ship and flipped it over, feeding on the little men as they fell into the water. The ships farthest from him tried to turn, using the magic that so irritated him as they travelled through the water. The sailors used to know that magic upon the waves could be their destruction, if the feel of it woke him. They would remember, now.

He picked five ships, reaching up with multiple tentacles, in one motion, to flip them over as he punched holes into the bottoms of a group of ships that were attempting to turn, ending the irritating magic as they sank quickly into the depths with their mages aboard. He pulled men and weapons off the ships without mages, snapping masts and pulling down the soft sails. Wrapping his tentacles around a group of ships, he tightened the coils, smashing them into each other and they crumbled.

He found himself humming an ancient tune, one no man alive and many of the gods themselves were not old enough to remember. A tune he did not think of in the dark times, in the soundless ocean depths, but which returned to him when he had a distraction, a plaything, a game. He chuckled and pulled another ship down under the water in one piece, holding it before his eyes as he watched pieces and sailors float off of the deck.

The debris spread far across the surface of the ocean as humans fought to stay afloat and ships sank past him, towards the cove's floor and wood came apart until even the shells of the ships were unrecognizable as such. The kraken played with the bigger pieces of the humans' handiwork and pulled down the rest of the sailors as they entered his domain. Time passed, the day sank into darkness, but this did not bother him—the one who spent most of his thousands of years far from where the sun could ever reach.

Too soon, there were only ship's pieces to pull apart and no more sailors left in the waves. Soon after that the kraken fell still. The sun had returned, but was nearly blocked from his resting place by the debris that floated above him. He settled along the bottom, picking through the pieces that had made it to the ocean's floor for more edibles. The water above grew still as he found less and less until there was no movement in the waters of the cove—as if a monster did not lurk, just below the surface. He wondered if they would send ships out, the little gods-shadow's friends. They would be just as fun to drag into the water. Perhaps he could find something big enough to toss at the human's fortress on the cliff side… Watch the little humans topple and fall.

The humans were not fooled. He felt a wave of their magic, the bright, coloured magic, wash across the ocean's bottom until it found him in his temporary resting place.

This was more than the irritating sting of the magics he had felt before. These purple and black fires _hurt_, and he tucked his tentacles close around his body in an effort to protect their delicate sensors.

_We thank you for your help_, a male human voice said, rippling through the water on magic as black as his ocean's depths in human tones, rather than the People-speech the shadow had used. The kraken did not understand the words fully, but the feeling and the tone were projected through the magic and into the water. A certain amount of fear, of course. He expected that. But there was determination and a hidden certainty, on the part of this human, that he could take on the kraken, take on _him_ and live to talk about it.

_Your services are no longer needed,_ another voice, female this time and rimmed in the deep purple of the weeds that lived on the ocean floor, near the volcanic rifts. _Please remove yourself from our harbour._ Again, that irritating arrogance, but the power _did_ sting, and the kraken wasn't sure he wanted to stay long enough to feel more of it.

_Remind the little fish that I did better than the whales could have, even if they had been willing to fight,_ the kraken said, as he turned away from the cove and pulled himself back towards the ocean's depths. He had done what she had wanted, after all… And she was interesting enough for him to want to be her choice of playmate if any other nasty fleets came to her doorstep.

And they would. The gods-touched were never cursed with a peaceful life.

His movement caught the water from the cove in the suction of his movement, and he heard cursing in the female's voice as the magic and the water followed with him. He felt the water flow away from him as her magic pulled it back towards the shoreline and he laughed.

He swam along the surface, slowly making his way back to the deep ridge where he had made his home. Floating along the ocean's surface, the kraken allowed his tentacles to sink beneath him. The sun warmed his dark body and he felt full and warm and content. Then he sank in a spiral, creating a whirlpool that followed him deep and he swam into the shadows and the coldness and the depths that were _his_ realm, out of the sun's reach.

He settled back into his hollow, content and secure. The memory of that battle would fill his mind and stave away the boredom for centuries to come. He shifted slightly, drawing in his tentacles and replayed the memory from the beginning.

Ah, lucky to have found that little fish.

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End file.
